Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham has made her commitment to children a mainstay of her next four years in office. By every metric, New Mexico is considered the worst state in the nation to be a child, and the governor has pledged that her administration will change that awful statistic.

Change begins with her newly appointed secretaries, those charged with affecting the lives of the state’s 517,000 kids. Searchlight New Mexico recently spoke with each one of them about how they intend to move the needle.

With New Mexico’s deeply embedded problems of child poverty, trauma, and other barriers to child well-being, Brian Blalock, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s pick to lead the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department, is stepping into what is arguably the most consequential job in state government.

Blalock is entering the position after a career working on child welfare issues both as an attorney and, most recently, as the law and policy director of Tipping Point Community, a San Francisco nonprofit focused on poverty and homelessness.

Searchlight New Mexico: You’ve spent many years working on programs to end homelessness and pull families out of poverty. How will that work inform your approach to state government in New Mexico?

Brian Blalock: My past work has shown me that there's always opportunity to collaborate across organizations and agencies. That’s especially important when we’re talking about super vulnerable populations, like individuals experiencing homelessness and at-risk kids and families. The real solutions happen across departments. That also should apply to our thinking within state agencies. Here in CYFD, we have Juvenile Justice, Protective Services, Early Childhood and other specialized silos all existing under one roof. That’s a fantastic opportunity — different silos exist so that we can give increased attention and increased specialization. If we can think strategically about coordinating and collaborating between those different silos and between different agencies like HSD and DOH, we can make a lot of progress. Also, in my in my nonprofit work I’ve had the chance to see quite a few jurisdictions try out programs and approaches that could possibly make sense for New Mexico.

SNM: What programs and approaches specifically do you think are worth looking at here

Blalock: I'll give you a few quick examples. One is this idea that if you really want to help super vulnerable, super traumatized youth, what you do is we have to build out community-based mental health services in a culturally competent way so that the youth and their families actually want to take advantage of them. We tend to make mental health services overly political and overly diagnostic at the front end, and we need to think about how to make those services actually attractive to youth as some states have done. Another big one is extended foster care — extending the age that a youth is eligible for foster care services from 18 to 21. New Mexico is late to the game in looking at this, and it’s a program that has been shown to reduce homelessness, reduce incarceration and improve child well-being. Think about where you were when you were 18. Would you have been able to be on your own without any help from your family, and been able to find your own housing, insurance and all that? For most people the answer is probably not — that’s a really tough spot to be in, yet that's what we do for our kids when the state is the parent.

SNM: But how would you convince an 18-year-old to stay in foster care if they have the option of making their own rules and living without strict supervision?

Blalock: Sounds crazy, right? But I think 36 states have implemented extended foster care in the country, and those states have consistently underestimated the number of kids who would choose to participate in it. The key is to implement it the right way — and with youth input. If we do it here, we really need to have transition-age youth leaders who can be our experts, based on their own experiences, and provide us with genuine policy input. States that have gotten this right have really emphasized that youth voice piece. And maybe it doesn’t look like a traditional foster home — maybe it looks like an apartment for example, but where the youth have access to support from case managers and social workers until they’re 21. The federal government gives us an option to help fund this kind of project, and right now we’re not opted in. It’s something we should take a look at.

SNM: There is a bill currently in the Legislature that would create a separate Early Childhood Department, apart from CYFD. Do you think that’s a good idea?

Blalock: Right now, early childhood is very well integrated into all of the different components of CYFD — behavioral health care, infant mental health, juvenile justice and other programs that are already in place — and these programs require a fair degree of sophistication and collaboration. Regardless of whether we build another department, I think we need to ask ourselves what, at this point, are we doing well and what are we not doing well when it comes to early childhood services. If and when we do pull all of those services into a new department, we just have to be really mindful that we are not creating more silos in places where we don’t actually want them or need them. All that to say, creating a new department is going to be an intimidating lift and we just have to be sure that we're solving more problems than were causing.